Month: May 2011

Original Author: Nick Darnell There are so many pitfalls you’ll encounter after using SWIG for any extended period of time or with a large enough codebase. I thought I would go over some of the more notable ones I’ve encountered creating a C# wrapper that had me sighing and doubling my caffeine intake. That said, … Continue reading “SWIG and a Miss”

Original Author: Luke Dicken I’ve been doing some very simplistic hacking around in Unity lately – really basic stuff, mostly to build a visualisation system for my research. In the process of doing this, I made a little maze, “borrowed” some assets from a Unity tutorial, and set it up so that you could control … Continue reading “How Complex is Complex Enough?”

Original Author: Claire Blackshaw Games let us craft interactive systems in which we can play and explore. We play with limited rule-sets, physics, combat, squad based AI, and a million other complex systems which give us a world to explore. Why then is one of the core human experiences, our social nature, all but missing … Continue reading “A Kiss is always harder than a Kill”

Original Author: Francesco Carucci My students might be moving their first careful steps in the dangerous lands of programming, but the problems I’m forcing them to face week after week are nothing short than “difficult”, even in code that is seemingly simple and straightforward. This week we were working on a sprite engine in C# … Continue reading “The best defense is a good offense”

Original Author: Niklas Frykholm Many bugs are easy to fix with debuggers, stack traces and printf-statements. But some are hard to even see with such tools. I’m thinking of things like frame rate hitches, animation glitches and camera stutters. You can’t put a breakpoint on the glitch because what constitutes a glitch is only defined … Continue reading “Monitoring your game”

Original Author: Gustavo Ambrozio Recap My latest post was on my repo on GitHub. Cool, I got code stalkers! One thing was missing from the post though: how to get metadata from existing images. In this post I’ll show you a few methods to do this as well as how to use my NSMutableDictionary category … Continue reading “Getting metadata from images on iOS”

Original Author: Mike Jungbluth What you believe in is what makes you who you are. It is what informs you of your opinions and dictates much of what you perceive as real. The games we make are no different. From the characters that we control, the world they live in, and how the player interacts … Continue reading “What Does Your Game Believe In?”

Original Author: Luke Hutchinson I remember a long time ago reading Michael Abrash’s Ramblings in Real Time articles in DDJ. 15 years back when they were working on Quake, he explained how they made use of the expensive floating point divide on the original Pentium (October 1996, ) Here is the code again. This time … Continue reading “Instruction Level Parallelism”